Balancing network resources between maintenance and network functionality is key to the efficient, reliable, and cost-effective administration of a network. Network administrators often decrease network resources to minimize network costs, but this creates a tension between the use of network resources for detection and isolation of network problems and the use of network resources for network functionality. When network resources are allocated to automatic problem detection and isolation, network resources are unavoidably diverted away from the processing of network traffic, resulting in degraded network performance. If more resources are allocated to network functionality, network problems may go undetected and reactive manual trouble-shooting can result in long delays and increased network downtime.
A technique for balancing network resources between the detection and isolation of network problems and network functionality is the leveraging of indicators that are already generated by network components. Network components generate a variety of indicators such as connection indicators transmitted between network components to establish a network connection, alarm indicators indicating a problem, or status indicators indicating the status of a component. These indicators can be collected from components dedicated to the processing of network traffic, such as routers and switches, and processed on components with resources less vital to basic network functionality. This cost-effective technique uses indicators already generated by network components to accomplish automatic problem isolation and detection without diverting resources away from network components intended to execute basic network functionality.
By monitoring indicators already generated by network components, typical operations, administration, and maintenance software, or similar software, which consumes the valuable processing resources of network equipment such as routers and switches, can be disabled. Operations, administration, and maintenance software is capable of detecting problems within and between layers of network components within the open system interconnect (OSI) model, but this detection and isolation capability is employed at the expense of network performance. Monitoring indicators from network components is also advantageous over manual detection and isolation of network problems which is often slow. Because manual detection and isolation is time consuming, network users are severely impacted by increased network downtime.
Although the process of monitoring indicators already generated by network components has many advantages over other detection and isolation methods, the process cannot be used to detect and isolate problems that occur between or are caused by components on different layers of the OSI model. Currently, the only solutions to problems related to or caused by a component on another layer of the network are manual detection and isolation or the use of software such as operations, administration, and maintenance software. Thus, there is a need for a method and apparatus that automatically correlate indicators already generated by network components to detect and isolate failures that are caused by or related to network components operating on different layers of the OSI model.